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SPRING BEAUTY. 
shadows over the tender springing grass and corn; we have no mossy 
lanes odorous with blue violets. One of our old poets thus writes : 
“Ye violets that first appear, 
By your pure purple mantles known, 
Like the proud virgins of the year, 
As if the spring were all your own, 
What are ye when the rose is blown.”* 
We miss the turfy banks, studded with starry daisies, pale primroses 
and azure blue-bells. 
Our May is bright and sunny, more like to the English March; 
it is indeed a month of promise—a month of many flowers. But 
too often its fair buds and blossoms are nipped by frost, “and winter, 
lingering, chills the lap of May.” 
In the warmth and shelter of the forest, vegetation appears. 
The black leaf mould so light and rich, quickens the seedlings into 
rapid growth, and green leaves and opening buds follow soon after 
the melting of the snows of winter. The starry blossoms of the 
hepatica, blood-root, bellwort, violets, white, yellow and blue, 
with the delicate coptis (gold-thread), come forth and are followed by 
many a lovely flower, increasing with the more genial seasons of 
May and June. 
But our April flowers are but few, comparatively speaking, and 
so we prize our early violets, liepaticas and Spring Beauty. 
* Sir Henry Wotton—written, in 1651. 
